Chapter Six #2
"There's something I never told you," I say, before I can talk myself into softening it.
"About how it started. You know the broad strokes.
Talking too long after last call, six weeks before it turned into something else.
What I didn't tell you, because I didn't want you to have to carry it, is that the first night anything happened, it wasn't some accident I stumbled into drunk.
I'd had two beers, tops. I was clear-headed enough to know exactly what I was choosing, and I chose it anyway, and I've let you believe for eight months that alcohol was doing more of the work than it actually was, because that version made me easier to almost forgive. "
Rowan goes very still, the particular stillness she gets when something's landed harder than her face wants to show.
"Why tell me now?"
"Because you didn't ask, and I've spent eight months only telling you things after you already caught me in the smaller lie first. Denise had to call you to get the real timeline.
You had to find that photocopy on your own to get the truth about Blackthorn's leverage.
I'm tired of being a man who only tells the truth when he's cornered into it.
So I'm telling you this one now, unprompted, because it's true, and because you deserve to know exactly what you're deciding whether to trust, not some slightly more forgivable version of it. "
She's quiet a long moment, turning her coffee cup slowly on the desk without drinking from it, and when she finally speaks her voice comes out lower than before, less armored.
"That's the first time in eight months you've told me something before I had to drag it out of you."
"I know."
"It doesn't fix anything."
"I know that too. Wasn't trying to fix anything.
Just trying to be a different kind of man than the one who let Denise do his talking for him.
" I stay in the doorway, hands loose at my sides, giving her the room to sit with it however she needs to.
"I'm not asking you to say anything back.
I just needed you to hear it from me instead of finding out some other way down the line, the way everything else about this has come out. "
"Why does it matter so much to you now? Being that kind of man.
" She's not being cruel with the question, just genuinely turning it over, studying me like a piece she's trying to figure out how to approach.
"Eight months ago you weren't this man. You were somebody who could look me dead in the eye and say 'once' when it was five months. What changed?"
It's a fair question, and I owe her a real answer instead of a comfortable one.
"Getting caught changed some of it. I won't pretend it didn't. But mostly it's watching what the lying actually cost, piece by piece, over eight months.
Watching you build a life that doesn't need me in it.
Watching a rock go through your window because of something I let happen with my mouth in a bar six hundred miles from here.
Every time I told myself the smaller version of a story to make myself easier to live with, it cost somebody something down the line.
You. This shop. Maybe Reina too, in a different way I only found out about today.
I got tired of being a man whose comfort came at everybody else's expense.
That's not some noble transformation, Rowan. That's just finally doing the math."
She looks at me for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes that I can't fully read, and then she picks the reading glasses out of her hair, sets them on the desk, and goes back to the invoices in front of her, which I understand well enough to know is its own kind of answer, not forgiveness, not absolution, just the small, guarded acknowledgment that something real just happened between us and she's not ready to say out loud what it means yet.
"Deb's back in twenty minutes," she says, not looking up. "You should probably go take your spot before she catches you standing in my doorway looking like that."
"Looking like what?"
"Like a man who thinks a confession buys him something.
" Her voice isn't unkind, exactly, just careful, exact, the voice of a woman who's learned the hard way not to let hope get ahead of evidence.
"It doesn't. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But it's noted, Wyatt.
That's all I can give you tonight. It's noted. "
I nod, because it's more than I expected and exactly as much as I deserve, and I head back out to the street to take up my post across from the shop.
I sit there through the last of the evening light thinking about Dax Cole's sister and what he thinks the club owes him for her, thinking about a folder full of thin evidence and a woman inside that shop who just told me my honesty is noted and nothing more.
Somewhere south of here, in a town I spent five careless months in, Reina Cole is dealing with the fallout of choices we made together, alone, without a club standing outside her door making sure nothing happens to her.
I don't know what to do with that yet, whether reaching out to her is even mine to consider given everything else on the table, or whether it's just one more way of making this about my own guilt instead of the people I actually owe something to.
For now I keep watch, because that's the one thing I know how to do without making the situation worse.
The street stays quiet. The light in Rowan's apartment window flicks on a little after ten, then off twenty minutes later, and I sit out here in the dark a while longer than my shift technically requires, turning that word over like a coin in my pocket.
Noted. It's more ground than I've had in eight months, and I intend to keep earning more of it, one unglamorous night at a time, whether it ever adds up to anything or not.
Somewhere around midnight, before I finally let myself doze against the tank for a couple hours, I pull my phone out and stare at Denise's number a long time without calling it.
There isn't a version of reaching out to Reina tonight that doesn't complicate something already complicated enough, and I'm not fool enough to think my guilt gets to jump the line ahead of the two women who actually have a claim on my attention right now, Rowan first, always Rowan first, and whatever debt is owed to Reina Cole sitting patient behind it until there's room to pay it without making things worse for the people standing closer to me.
I put the phone away and watch the street instead, because watching the street is a debt I know exactly how to pay.
Somewhere past two, Deuce texts to confirm he's got the alley covered starting tomorrow like Silas asked, adds a line at the end that isn't strictly necessary, heard today went okay at the shop, glad to hear it.
Word travels fast in this club even when nobody means for it to.
I don't know yet whether that's a comfort or one more layer of pressure, everybody watching to see if the man who broke something this big is capable of putting even a small piece of it back together.
Either way, I text back a thanks and settle in for the rest of the night, one more shift logged, one more small brick laid on a foundation that's still a long way from solid.